“Do something!” pleaded his wife in alarm.

“Why should I?” retorted the frustrated hunter. “That lion got himself into this mess – let him get himself out of it!”

Everything is mysterious: it is better to enjoy it rather than trying to understand it. Ultimately the man who goes on trying to understand life proves to be a fool, and the man who enjoys life becomes wise goes on enjoying life, because he becomes more and more aware of the mysterious that surrounds us.

The greatest understanding is to know that nothing can be understood, that all is mysterious and miraculous. To me this is the beginning of religion in your life.

Osho,
I love to do tai chi and it has become my daily meditation, but I have a tendency to become too serious about it. Can you drive out the monkey?

It is impossible for anybody to drive the monkey out of your mind, because it does not exist; your seriousness is creating it. And nobody can change your seriousness either. It is your life attitude which is making you serious. What is there to be serious about? Existence is a continuous celebration, a festival that knows no holidays.

You are serious because for thousands of years people have been telling you that the serious man is a better man, higher man, more evolved than the nonserious. The nonserious have never been taken into account.

But to me the situation is just the reverse. The nonserious one is the one who will come to know the real life and its experiences. Seriousness is closing you, making you hard, making you sad. Seriousness comes from ambition, from desire which you are not being able to attain.

But the religions have paid too much respect to seriousness. I have never come across in any religious scripture of any religion – and there are three hundred religions on the earth – that anybody has paid respect to nonseriousness, to playfulness, to a sense of humor. They all make you dodos.

I have heard…one day as the bishop entered a church in New York, he could not believe his eyes: he saw Jesus Christ standing there.

He said, “My god! I thought that prayers are never heard. I never believed that there is any God or any son of God – but what to do with this fellow? Either he is a hippie or he is Jesus Christ. I am in trouble.”

He approached the man and asked, “Can I ask you who you are?”